Whose woods
these were

Skidmores
350-acre North Woods is many things to many people: a place for academic
research and mountain biking, for visiting scientists and local joggers,
for quiet walks and occasional wild parties. All who use the woods
share them with hundreds of species of plants and animals, some common,
some rare. In that regard, the woods havent changed much in
a long time; in other ways, theyve been altered dramatically
over the ages. In this two-part series, Scope presents the history
(below) and the current state of affairs (next issue) of this precious,
and pressured, campus resource.

by
Kathryn Gallien

Its a hot, sunny August afternoon, and
Dick Lindemann wants to go to the beach.

I hope we can still see it, says
the Skidmore geology professor, tromping into the North Woods at
an entry point across the loop road from Jonsson Tower. Yes,
here it is. See, where the mulleins are growing. He walks
to a point just above the barest suggestion of a shelf. Heres
where youd put your beach blanket. And turning around,
looking back downhill at piles of modern-day construction debris,
he leads a trip back in time to gaze upon glacial Lake Albany 12,500
years ago.

An
early map of the Woodlawn estate

Thats relatively recent history to a
geologist. Most of the rock on the Skidmore campus and North Woods
is actually 500 million years old, Gailor dolomite from early in
the Ordovician period (just after the Cambrian, when the first invertebrates
developed). The whole area was under a shallow sea back thena
lagoon-reef system inhabited by the ancestors of todays marine
faunawhich makes it a good place to study how marine life
gets re-established after a mass extinction.

Skidmore
geologist Dick Lindemann poses with a boulder left in the woods
by a passing glacier many eons ago.

The North Woods is a productive laboratory
for Skidmore geology professors, a place to get students thinking.
Heres a good puzzle for students, says Lindemann,
pointing out a large boulder of Adirondack crystalline rock. It
shouldnt be here, he says. We ask students to
come up with a theory of how it got here.

Elsewhere in the woods are sinkholes that developed
over time due to the water solubility of the dolomite. While there
arent many fossils to be found, there are flints and quartz
crystals, so-called Herkimer diamonds. And there are the famous
faults. Says Lindemann, Skidmore and Saratoga Springs owe their
existence to an unusual geologic phenomenon: the mineral springs
that emanate from the downdropped side of the MacGregor fault and
its offshoots, the Saratoga and Woodlawn Park faults. The main part
of the fault is easily visible to the west of State Route 9, running
north all the way up to Lake George. Through the city and the Spa
State Park, you can mark it by following the mineral springs. In
Skidmores North Woods, the fault runs along the eastern boundary;
the Surrey Williamson Inn and Eissner Admissions Center sit at its
top.

Roaming around in the North Woods, a geologist
is bound to stumble on evidence usually studied in other disciplinesbotany,
ornithology, art, cultural history. It turns out that Lindemann
knows where to find the last vestiges of the famed Woodlawn estate:
stone foundations from the Grotto Stable, big enough to house fifty
horses, that stood in the area behind Wilson Chapel a century ago.
To talk of Woodlawn, though, requires first melting the glaciers
and populating the North Woods.

Your
land, my land

There have been native people in the Hudson
Valley for at least 10,000 years, following the retreat of the Wisconsin
glaciation some 12,600 years ago and the subsequent draining of
Lake Albany. Between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago deciduous forests
established themselves. By 8000 BC, in the Archaic period, hunters
and gatherers were exploiting the areas seasonal resources.
The predominant culture identified in the area of Skidmores
present campus is the Northeast Woodland Indian culture, from 1400
BC to 1500 AD.

The land here yields evidence of Mohican
cultural traditions back to 500 BC, says professor of anthropology
Susan Bender. Mohicans held the land at the time of first contact
with Europeans, but in the mid-1600s, wearied and with diminishing
ranks after fur-trade wars with the Dutch, they ceded their lands
up and down the Hudson Valley to the Mohawks.

Skidmores North Woods was in a large
hunting and fishing region and was a key thoroughfare for native
people. The Saratoga-Montreal Trail passed right through the North
Woods on its northward course until it joined the major Schenectady-Montreal
Trail just north of Saratoga Springs. Saratoga city historian and
postmaster John Corey documented the Saratoga-Montreal Trail in
1924, mapping it through the woods on a track pretty much due north
from State Street. His hand-drawn memory map also marked
an Indian Spring and Indian Mortar along
the trail. (Indeed in 1947 Louis Robinson, the last superintendent
of Woodlawn Park, recalled discovering the conical samp mortar
or grist mill while he was walking in 1895 at the woods edge
near todays Maple Avenue Middle School.)

Carriage
rides in Woodlawn Park, 1889

While there are no active archaeology research
sites in the North Woods, Bender suggests that there could be artifacts
along the trailsigns of a hearth, chipped stone, discarded
bone. The middle schools Glen Mitchell Archaeology Club has
found several artifacts including an Otter Creek spear point
dating to the middle-late Archaic, about 5,000 years agoin
the area behind the school. We havent found anything
indicating settlements, says site manager Scott Padeni. And
he notes that the point was found in a disturbed area, mixed in
with material from a later period, probably left during excavation
for the foundations of the nineteenth-century Glen Mitchell Hotel.
Project archaeologist Louise Basa says club members still hope to
find something intact from that period, adding that they have identified
a quarry area and chipped fragments that indicate native people
were using the quarry. All the elements were present, she adds,
to support seasonal encampments during the Archaic period: the quarry
for making tools, a stream, a spring, wetland vegetation, fish,
and game. At a much later time, Basa adds, early Europeans would
record a similar pattern of seasonal camps by family groups moving
through the region.

From
woodland to Woodlawn

Europeans moved quickly in the seventeenth
century to acquire lands in this region from the Mohawks. In 1684
Peter Schuyler and six other Albany residents bought from the Mohawks
the area called Saraghtoga (including what is now called Old Saratoga,
in the Schuylerville area) with the Saratoga Patent. Then in 1708
the North Woods was part of the large Kayaderosseras Patent, granted
by the Dutch Queen Anne to thirteen of her loyal subjects, including
Johannes Beekman and Rip Van Dam. The patentees were slow to settle,
not asking for a survey and boundary determination until 1732, and
the Mohawks continued to hunt and fish the area. Not until the French
and Indian Wars ended in 1764 did settlers start to move in. At
first they were driven off by Mohawks, who were understandably unaware
of the fifty-six-year-old agreement and appealed to Sir William
Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs, who tried
to have the patent nullified but failed. In 1768 the Mohawks ratified
the patent and accepted $5,000 for the huge tractmore than
500,000 acres, according to several sources.

In 1771 the Kayaderosseras Patent was finally
divided into twenty-five allotments of thirteen lots each. Lot 12
of the 16th Allotment went to heirs of Rip Van Dam, who subdivided
and sold one-third to Jacob Walton. Waltons son, Judge Henry
Walton, would name his property Woodlawn and build the first mansion
there in 1820. After his death, the mansion and farm passed through
several hands until they were finally sold under mortgage foreclosure.

In 1879 Woodlawn was purchased by another judge
named Henry: Henry Hilton, a rather unscrupulous associate of New
York Citys notorious Boss Tweed. In the years that followed,
Judge Hilton acquired more than 1,000 acresincluding the land
where the main Skidmore campus sits and, adjacent to it, what city
historian Evelyn Barrett Brittens Chronicles of Saratoga called
an extended forest tract with an old Indian Trail running
through it.

Hiltons new mansion, completed in 1880,
was a three-story brick and frame extravaganza, with twenty-six
apartments, seven bathrooms, and extensive porches. He set out to
surround the mansion with a grand park-like setting of expansive
lawns and picturesque woodlands. It was a Herculean feat of landscaping,
according to the Troy Daily Times (June 3, 1881): Depressions
had to be filled in, rocks blasted and taken away, a hill cut away
there, a clump of unsightly trees removed here, the underbrush in
the woods removed ... Some of the roads are built upon foundations
of stone many feet in depth, and the earth on either side filled
up to correspond. These roads wind in and out of shady groves, up
and down pretty glens and along smooth lawns decorated with many
rare and costly marble statues. More than half of the roadways
wound through the North Woods, where they are still visible today.

Through the 1880s and 1890s Hiltons Woodlawn
was the place to visit. There were several mansions, elaborately
appointed with mahogany paneling, enormous fireplaces, finely carved
furniture, Persian and Turkish carpets, Wedgwood vases, French beveled-glass
mirrors, Chinese porcelain, silk wall coverings, and numerous art
treasures. Hiltons guests, and members of the public who held
his special permits, could enjoy the extensive carriage trails that
meandered through the estate and adjoining woods, some lit at night
with kerosene lamps. Later, Hilton accommodated the public more
openly. In 1884 he allowed a giant toboggan slide to be built on
what is now the dirt road extension at the end of North Broadway.
For its grand opening on January 1, 1885, Hilton brought guests
up from New York City, including William H. Vanderbilt, who chartered
an entire train car. In 1886 Hilton let the exclusive Saratoga Toboggan
Club build an even grander slide near the Glen Mitchell Hotel. Word
was that sliders could reach speeds upwards of 60 mph on the 3,000-foot
run. The younger Hiltons hosted grand torch-lit sliding and skating
parties in the woods.

Townspeople were also welcome for skating on
the Vly, a pond at the base of the hill that was later used by Skidmore
students as a ski slope. The VlyDutch for a marsh or temporary
lakewas a pond as far back as 1775, when Preston Denton settled
by it, and it later figured prominently in Woodlawn Park entertainment.
There were rumored to be gondolas plying the pond and huge model
ships inside the nearby boathouse. Skidmores Dick Lindemann
has seen fragments of clams and mussels near the site of the Vlys
boathouse. Saratogas public works commissioner Thomas McTygue
warmly remembers swimming there in the 1950s: All the kids
swam in the Fly.  McTygue also remembers playing
in the ruins of the last Woodlawn mansion, which hung on until the
1950s. The kids would throw chestnuts and apples at each other,
he says. And when we ran out of fruit, we had plaster fights.

Skidmore
students and friends enjoy the Woodlawn ski slope in 1932.

Woodlawns fortunes had begun to turn
soon after Judge Hilton died in 1899. His heirs took little interest
in the mammoth estate. Soon the graceful and elaborate buildings
stood vacant most of the time. Young people from town continued
to visit the Vly, which in the early 1900s took on the moniker Love
(or sometimes Lovers) Lake.

In the days of the Skidmore School of Arts
in the 1910s, founder Lucy Skidmore Scribner had considered purchasing
the great estate that sat adjacent to her home at 791 North Broadway
(today the Skidmore presidents home, Scribner House). And
Skidmores first president Charles Henry Keyes, discouraged
by the condition of the downtown campus buildings, was keenly interested
in it too. Indeed the idea of Woodlawn continued to circulate
at Skidmore for years, as professor of American studies Mary
C. Lynn tells it in her history of the college, Make No Small Plans.
But Woodlawn was not to become the college campus until fifty years
later.

In 1916 the old Hilton estate was sold at auction
in eight parcels. The largest comprised 600 acres, sixteen buildings,
countless sculptures and works of art, and some twenty-five miles
of gravel roads and trails, many of them winding through the North
Woods. The next several owners included a crooked ex-Congressman
who cut down many old-growth trees to sell for lumber, a bootlegger,
a millionaire candy maker, and a conglomerate of speculators who
offered the final auction of furnishings in 1928. Through the 1930s
and 1940s vandals and thieves picked over the remains.

Meanwhile, the City of Saratoga Springs seized
the literal high ground in 1934, annexing nearly four and a half
acres on which it built a pair of underground water tanks to hold
and distribute the citys water supply. Located on a hill directly
behind Falstaffs, the Skidmore student pub, the reservoir
still moves 4 to 6 million gallons of water daily, pumped up from
the water treatment plant on Excelsior Avenue and fed by gravity
back down into Saratogas sinks and bathtubs.

As for the once-grand mansions of Woodlawn,
grass fires took the final toll. All but one of the buildings fell
to a fire in 1948; Wayside, the last mansion standing (on the residential
end of todays campus), was destroyed by fire in 1958.

A
1906 postcard of Lovers Lake

A
new campus for Skidmore

From the ashes another grand complex of buildings
was to emerge. In 1960, with an extraordinary gift from J. Erik
and Margaret Jonsson, the Texas parents of a Skidmore student, Skidmore
College purchased much of the original Woodlawn property. At the
time, Skidmores Fifty Acres athletics area on Union Avenue
was about to be lost to construction of the Adirondack Northway
segment of Interstate 87. In a memo to the faculty, Skidmore president
Val Wilson noted that it was Jonssons wish that the Woodlawn
tract be utilized as replacement for Fifty Acres and that
further study be made by the College for its long-range use.
It didnt take long. When trustees saw the site, they undertook
a year-long study to determine the feasibility of moving the entire
campus there.

In his Saratoga Springs: An Architectural History,
professor emeritus of art history James Kettlewell, who served on
the college committee that made the decision to move, remembered
his first visit to Woodlawn in 1959: All that remained standing
were the rock-faced stone ruins of the ground floor of Wayside,
with its great stone arch. Betty Noyes McMath 47 also
has fond memories of that arch. In 1945, her science class worked
on a water clarifying project on the Woodlawn grounds. After class,
her boyfriend and future husband drove up, and the two of them walked
around the ruins and in the woods. It was so nice and peaceful
up there, she remembers. I still have a hickory nut
that I picked up. She had suggested to President Wilson that
the archway be saved and used in the entrance to the new campus,
and Wilson liked the idea. But the archway crumbled when workmen
tried to take it down, leaving only the keystone intact. Wilson
kept the keystone in his office and, after he died, acting president
Josephine Young Case invited McMath to collect it. She then kept
it in her garden for many years before returning it to Skidmore
upon her fiftieth reunion in 1997.

By 1961 Skidmores board of trustees authorized
construction of a new campus on the old estate. The North Woods
area, a natural buffer to the outside world, figured prominently
into the equation, with early site plans targeting the area for
winter athletics and recreation. Indeed Skidmore had conducted ski
classes in Woodlawn Park as early as 1932. In the winter of 1937-38,
Lynn writes in her history, dean Margaret Bridgman and president
Henry Moore each broke a leg skiing on the Woodlawn slope! As the
new campus developed in the 1960s, the college would again open
the Skidmore ski slope for classes and recreation.

Of the woods as a whole, new-campus planning
consultant Samuel Zisman wrote: To the north, where the terrain
is rugged and serves as a natural barrier, there abound wonderful
possibilities for both winter and warm weather sportsski trails,
riding trails, lookout points, and arborwaysa botanical setting
for walks, a lodge in the woods, perhaps, at the edge of the pond.
Thus, a possible blueprint for the multiple uses of Skidmores
North Woods.

Kathryn Gallien, who recently left her post as Skidmores
director of publications, is now a part-time staff writer and freelancer.
Shes a frequent North Woods walker.

Editor's
note: In part two, a look at the woods today, including
the synergies and tensions among the joggers, bikers, botanists,
geologists, ornithologists, artists, city workers, middle school
pupils, and others who share this multifaceted resource. Meanwhile,
if you have a story to share about studying, exercising, or
partying in the North Woods, please e-mail kgallien@skidmore.edu
by February 26.